At a Christie's auction in October 1998, a battered medieval manuscript sold for two million dollars to an anonymous bidder, who then turned it over to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for further study. The manuscript was a palimpsest—a written parchment scraped clean and reused by a 13th-century monk. But as classics professor Reviel Netz and curator William Noel found through high-tech scanning and imaging, a trace of the original text remained embedded in the pages, and revealed the words of Archimedes.

"Like a multilayered detective story, Noel's account of Archimedes' precarious chain of transmission from original papyrus to 20th-century America has clues, blind alleys, brushes with oblivion, and compulsive readability.... Noel cogently describes the technical conservation and imaging difficulties the codex presented.... Netz lucidly argues that Archimedes was on the verge of inventing calculus. A thrilling story of the ancient world lost, found, and explained."—Booklist